All our free courses
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Nature & Environment
Animals at the extremes: the desert environment
Animal life has adapted to survive in the most unlikely and inhospitable habitats. This free course, Animals at the extremes: the desert environment, looks at the surprisingly diverse desert climates throughout the world and mammals, birds, lizards and amphibians that survive there. It splits these animals into three groups according to their ...
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History & The Arts
Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
This free course introduces Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), with the aim of understanding how she writes about time, memory, and ideas about identity. It also considers why Woolf’s fiction is often considered difficult. Selected extracts from her essays on writing help to clarify some of these perceived difficulties, ...
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Languages
Exploring languages and cultures
Explore the multiple relationships between languages and cultures. In this free course you will learn about the benefits and challenges of meeting people from different cultures and the ways in which language and human communities shape each other. You will look at the role of intercultural competence at the workplace, reflect on the use of ...
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Education & Development
Exploring equality and equity in education
This free course, Exploring equality and equity in education, considers the complexity of social justice as applied to education and reflects on the different purposes of, and value ascribed to, education in different countries and cultures. It discusses different conceptions of 'justice' and the distinction between equity and equality.
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Society, Politics & Law
Reading visual images
What does a picture or an image tell you? This free course, Reading visual images, is an introduction to analysing and interpreting photographs as social data. Who controls what the image is saying? You will look at how photographs provide visual evidence and how they can illustrate and support our ideas about society.
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Society, Politics & Law
Equity – law and idea
This free course, Equity – law and idea, gives you the opportunity to broaden your skills in and knowledge and understanding of legal principles. Beyond the confines of the Common Law of England and Wales Equity is rarely discussed or understood, but has long played a vital role in the social, economic, cultural and political life of the nation....
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Science, Maths & Technology
Approaches to software development
This free course, Approaches to software development, presents an engineering approach to the development of software systems – a software engineering approach. The course pays particular attention to issues of software quality, in terms of both product (what is built) and process (how we build it).
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History & The Arts
Discovering Ancient Greek and Latin
The free course, Discovering Ancient Greek and Latin, gives a taste of what it is like to learn two ancient languages. It is for those who have encountered the classical world through translations of Greek and Latin texts and wish to know more about the languages in which these works were composed.
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Money & Business
Different types of business
A small grocery store run by one person and perhaps their family must pose quite different challenges from a multinational corporation with operations in many different countries. This free course introduces different types of business, depending on industry sector, size and type of ownership and discusses some of the ways in which businesses ...
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Money & Business
Business communication: writing a SWOT analysis
This free course, Business communication: writing a SWOT analysis, is designed to develop your writing skills for business. You will be taken step by step through the process of writing a SWOT analysis, with clear advice on selecting key information from a case study text, making concise notes, choosing an appropriate structure and using ...
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Education & Development
Children’s perspectives on play
In this free course, Children's perspectives on play, you are asked to put yourself in the place of young children and to think about their view of play and their reasons for playing. When children have personal freedom to choose and make decisions about what and who they want to play with, as well as where they want to play, they are highly ...
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Money & Business
Asset allocation in investment
This course looks at how to take investor objectives and constraints and turn them into a portfolio which aims at achieving an expected return and level of risk appropriate for the investor. In this free course, Asset allocation in investment, portfolio optimisation techniques such as portfolio theory can be used to determine how much of an ...
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Science, Maths & Technology
An introduction to interaction design
From apps, phones and business systems to wearables, the Web and the Internet of Things, interactive products have become part of everyday life. But how can interactions be designed to best meet their purpose and offer good user experience? This free course, An introduction to interaction design, explores this topic. You will learn: what ...
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Science, Maths & Technology
An introduction to design engineering
This free course, An introduction to design engineering, looks at the way in which engineers use ideas and approaches from the discipline of design thinking to inform their work. The complexity that people bring to design problems is introduced, along with some basic methods of dealing with such complexity.
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History & The Arts
Artists and authorship: the case of Raphael
Individual artists have been the traditional focus of art history, but how do we evaluate the figure of the artist? This free course, Artists and authorship: the case of Raphael, takes the life of Raphael as a case study. You will examine sixteenth-century sources to explore the creation of artistic authorship in the early modern era. The ...
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Recovery strategies in sport and exercise
The ability to recover quickly from an intensive training session or match can be extremely advantageous to sports performers. Sport and fitness participants are increasingly using strategies such as ice baths and compression clothing to enhance their recovery from intensive exercise, but how effective are these strategies? Do they really speed ...
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History & The Arts
Getting started on classical Latin
This course has been developed in response to requests from learners who had had no contact with Latin before and who felt they would like to spend a little time preparing for the kind of learning that studying a classical language involves. The course will give you a taster of what is involved in the very early stages of learning Latin and will...
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Health, Sports & Psychology
Emotions and emotional disorders
In this free course, Emotions and emotional disorders, you will learn about some of the disorders related to the feelings of stress, sadness and anxiety including how these disorders are diagnosed, their biological correlates, and evidence of their possible causes.